Jurassic World’s Rex Sized Box Office Performance

As many of you know, Jurassic World was released this past weekend and shattered box office records. There’s more to this story than just that however. As I look back to the week of its release, I saw that there were estimates any where from $110m-$155m for the weekend. These estimates held through until the Thursday night results rolled in wit a whopping $18.5m, while this isn’t a record breaking number, it his a massive number for Thursday showings. The early estimates then jumped up to $160-170m for the whole weekend. Everything turned when Friday results came around on Saturday morning posting that it had made $81.9m. That in itself was a huge surprise to everyone. All of the skeptics dropped their pens then picked them back up guessing about $190-200m for the whole weekend. Only one other movie was in the $200m opening weekend club, Avengers (2012) with $207m. Saturday added $69.6m and Sunday added $57.2m with a grand total of $208.8m total for the weekend beating Avengers for the title. Adding on to that it also made $25.3 and $24.3m on Monday and Tuesday, both of which were record breaking numbers for the days.

Many of you have heard these numbers already and that would just make this article pointless, however I’m posing the question as to why this happened. Really, why was Jurassic World able to make this much money on one weekend? It’s not all of your favorite superheroes in one big movie, instead it’s a dinosaur movie. I didn’t even think dinosaurs were still hot with kids and adults. Clearly I was wrong, after seeing the movie I saw that it was a perfect movie to appeal to both adults and kids and is the ultimate popcorn movie of the year so far. You could say there are many reasons why this happened, but I believe it really comes down to the gap between the last one and this one. The problem is that the only one that made anything close to what this one is making was the original Jurassic Park. This one really must’ve hit the original fans as it felt like the sequel they always wanted, so they brought their kids, however it also shows that dinosaurs still appeal to the younger people also, therefore it really got everyone to attend as the profit shows. I have no doubt that this film will break $1 billion at the worldwide box office, but can it take any more titles on its way? We’ll have to continue watching its performance in the coming weeks. The question I will leave you with is this: If Jurassic World can make $208.8m in an opening weekend with 14 years between it and its horrible last movie, then what can Star Wars: The Force Awakens do in December…?